OTHER than the Queen Victoria Building, the Rocks and the Opera House, Sydney’s central business district could be razed and nothing of aesthetic value would be lost, Paul Keating said yesterday.

Urban Development Institute of Australia executive director David Poole said Mr Keating’s performance as a proponent of “Zegna-suited Woollahra-focused elitism” showed why the Australian people had hated him so much.

“In the Paul Keating urban utopia, every part of Sydney would look like Paris,” Dr Poole said.

OTHER than the Queen Victoria Building, the Rocks and the Opera House, Sydney’s central business district could be razed and nothing of aesthetic value would be lost, Paul Keating said yesterday.

In a sweeping tirade, the former prime minister called on the Iemma Government to buy back Sydney’s Cross City Tunnel, and warned of the city being ruined by greedy developers and a “rotten” local government system.

And he couldn’t let the occasion, a speech on urban renewal at Sydney University, pass without a reference to his successor, this week celebrating his 10th anniversary in the job.

“I reformed the Australian economy on Mahler and Bruckner,” he declared. “If I said that to John Howard he would think I was talking Swahili. There is no fantasy there. What you see is what you get. Dullness, dullness, dullness.”

Urban Development Institute of Australia executive director David Poole said Mr Keating’s performance as a proponent of “Zegna-suited Woollahra-focused elitism” showed why the Australian people had hated him so much.

“In the Paul Keating urban utopia, every part of Sydney would look like Paris,” Dr Poole said.

Mr Keating said the local government system inherited from the English was “profoundly dysfunctional” and Sydney’s Parramatta Road was an “urban sewer”.

The NSW Land and Environment Court had made some “god awful” decisions and getting good quality judges for the court was “always a challenge”.

The state Government had made a mistake in making the Cross City Tunnel a private tollway and it should be returned to the public.

“The best thing that could happen to this is that it could go back to public ownership with a public toll like the Harbour Bridge toll,” he said.

Mr Keating spent much of his speech criticising developers, saying any two butchers or grocers could finance a building project with no thought to the urban environment.

He described much of Sydney, apart from the Opera House, the Rocks and the QVB, as “a knockdown job”.

Mr Keating urged the audience to stand up to developers’ millions.

And the compounding editorial: